Category Archives: Training techniques

There was a stream of news stories last summer about sex and the Olympics, as the newspapers got overexcited about the idea of lots of athletes living in close quarters with each other in the Olympic village. A quick web search turns up dozens of these. Some examples:

It is absolutely right that there are ancient precedents for the idea that abstaining from sex could help athletic performance.

Aelian, Varia Historia 3.30, tells us that the athlete Cleitomachus was so abstinent that he never slept with his wife, and that he would turn away if he saw dogs mating in the street. That anecdote picks up on the standard idea of athletes as models of virtue and self-control.

In other sources, the physiological basis of the link between athletic training and sexual abstinence is made clearer. At least in some ancient medical texts loss of semen is associated with loss of strength and masculine vitality. One often quoted example is from the discussion of gonorrhea in Aretaeus, On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Disease 2.5, CMG 2.71, quoted in this good piece by Peter Jones in the Spectator–also from last August.

Some authors also suggest that semen production is lowered because the material the body would normally use for it is diverted to muscle-building. Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 8.4, 724e includes the following observation (in the course of a discussion of why palm fronds are awarded to victorious athletes, here suggesting that it is because they share the quality of sterility): ‘as for an athlete, its shapeliness uses up all its nourishment for building up the body, so that what is left for the production of seed is very little, and of poor quality’.

Of course that’s not the only side of the story: there are some cases where athletes were renowned precisely for their lack of sexual self-control. The emperor Elagabalus, in the early third century AD, famously took as his lover the athlete Aurelius Zoticus (see here for a translation of the whole lurid story from Cassius Dio 79.16, unless you’re feeling easily shocked).

How to spot a sexually active athlete

As so often, Philostratus’ Gymnasticus is one of the best places to look for the question of how these views impacted on day-to-day training:

Those who come to the gymnasium straight after sex are exposed by a greater number of indicators when they train, for their strength is diminished and they are short of breath and lack daring in their attacks, and they fade in colour in response to exertion, and they can be detected by signs of that sort; and when they strip, their hollow collar-bones give them away, their poorly structured hips, the conspicuous outline of their ribs, and the coldness of their blood. These athletes, even if we dedicated ourselves to them, would have no chance of being crowned [i.e. winning victory] in any contest. The part beneath the eyes is weak, the beating of their hearts is weak, their perspiration is weak, their sleep, which controls digestion, is weak, and their eyes glance around in a wandering fashion and indicate an appearance of lustfulness…. If an athlete has just had sex, it is better for him not to exercise. In what sense are they men, those who exchange crowns and victory announcements for disgraceful pleasures? But if they must undergo training, let them be trained, but with the caveat that their strength and their breathing must be closely observed; for these are the things which are damaged most by the pleasures of sex. (Gymnasticus 48 and 52)

Whether Philostratus’ instructions for spotting one of these people could ever be effectively applied is far from clear!–presumably this is based more on a set of assumptions about what sex is likely to do to an athlete than on experimental research.

But it does show very vividly just how much weight abstinence seems to have been given within ancient sport. It also shows just how vulnerable and precarious the athletic body was thought to be.

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Here’s a story of death from over-exertion from the classical world—and in the process some reflections on ancient training practices, at Olympia and elsewhere.

The death of Gerenos

One of our most important sources for what went on in ancient gymnasia is Philostratus’ Gymnasticus (early third century AD). It’s a kind of manual of athletic training techniques, which gives a highly idealised vision of the job of the athletic trainer and the history of the discipline.

It’s a difficult text in many ways, but it’s full of good anecdotes about trainers at the Olympics. Here’s one:

Evidence against the tetrad system, which I have already rejected, also comes from the great error made in the case of the wrestler Gerenos, whose tomb lies in Athens on the right of the road to Eleusis. For this man was from Naukratis, and was one of the best wrestlers, as demonstrated by the victories he won in competition. He happened to win at Olympia, and two days after later he celebrated his victory and gave a feast for some of his friends, eating more luxuriously than he was used to, and was deprived of sleep. When he came to the gymnasium the next day he admitted to his trainer that he was suffering from indigestion and that he felt unwell in some way. The trainer became angry and listened furiously and was irritable with him on the grounds that he was relaxing his training and interrupting the tetrads, until he actually killed the athlete through his training, out of ignorance, by not prescribing the exercises he should have chosen even if the athlete had said nothing about his condition [in other words the trainer should have been perceptive enough to work out Gerenos’ condition from his outward bodily appearance]. The damage which is caused by this kind of tetrad system and by a trainer who is so untrained and uneducated is not inconsiderable. How can it not be a bad thing that the stadia should lose an athlete of that calibre? (Gymnasticus 54)

We can’t be absolutely sure that the story is true—this athlete isn’t mentioned in any other ancient text. But it does look entirely plausible. The recent cases of Piermario Morosini and Claire Squires are desperately sad reminders of that—these things still happen in sport today, and there’s no reason to think that that wouldn’t have been the case in the ancient world too.

Training facilities at Olympia

But even if the story is a fabrication by Philostratus or one of his sources, it can still tell us a lot about the Olympics and about ancient conceptions of training.

For one thing it gives us a glimpse of how important the training facilities at Olympia must have been. There was a big gymnasium building on the north-eastern edge of the Olympic site with a practice running track (top left in this map, labelled ‘Palaestra’—with the temple of Zeus and other temples in the centre, and the stadium stretching away on the right-hand side):

It must have been packed with athletes during the days around the contests.

It’s particularly interesting to see this athlete training in the Olympic gymnasium after the Olympic events have finished. He has stayed on for several days after the contests, in order to celebrate his victory. The contests themselves took place on the fourth day of the festival, with the fifth day set aside for prize-giving and official banquets, which is why Gerenos has to wait for two days after the victory to have his own private party. Presumably he is heading off to compete at another festival soon in some other part of the Mediterranean world, which is why he needs to keep in good condition.

Principles of training

Even more interesting, I think, is what this reveals about ancient conceptions of training.

Philostratus, like other ancient authors, stresses the importance of adapting training to the needs of the individual. That means responding carefully to the distinctive physiological make-up of each individual athlete, or in this case to temporary alterations in the body (caused here by recent overindulgence), rather than imposing the same blanket training regime on everyone. (The ‘tetrad’ system, heavily criticised by Philostratus here, was a system for training athletes on a rigid four-day cycle, with different types and intensities of exercise on each of the four days of the cycle). Presumably most modern trainers would agree about the importance of adapting to the individual (e.g. see here or here or on the ‘Individual differences principle’ in modern training).

In the process the passage also puts a lot of emphasis on the responsibilities of the athletic trainer himself. Philostratus suggests that the trainer needs to know his athlete as well as the athlete knows himself—he should have spotted that there was something wrong with Gerenos without being told. In this anecdote at least, getting the relationship between trainer and athlete right is crucial for an athlete’s future.

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One expense the organisers of the 2012 Olympics won’t have is the cost of providing oil for the athletes. Ancient athletes in training and competition would cover themselves in oil before starting. Providing the oil for a city’s gymnasia and festivals was enormously expensive. There are many surviving inscriptions in honour of wealthy benefactors who have taken on that financial burden. In some cases they even boast of having gone beyond the bare minimum: we have quite a few texts which mention scented olive oil, or oil of a particularly high grade.

Why?

Why did ancient athletes use oil?

Clearly it was viewed as a healthy thing to do. One inscription from the Roman empire (I. Magnesia 116, 9-11) makes that point nicely: ‘…and since the use of oil is very appropriate and very necessary for human bodies and especially so for the bodies of the old…’ (before going on to give details of the funding sources the city is using to pay for it).

Stephen Miller in his 2004 book Ancient Greek Athletics (p. 15) gives the following answer:

‘Some suggest that rubbing the oil in helped to warm up and limber the muscles before exercise, others that the oil protected the skin from the sun and the elements. Another theory is that oil produced a glistening body which was aesthetically pleasing and desirable, or that the coating of oil prevented the loss of bodily fluids during exercise…There may also have been a religious dimension: the athlete dedicated himself by the use of oil [which was used, for example, to anoint divine images]…These theories are not mutually exclusive, and we may suspect that the custom was so venerable and ubiquitous among the Greeks that they themselves were uncertain of its full range of significance’.

Olive oil and the humours

That all sounds exactly right to me. I just want to add one further point (related to Miller’s penultimate explanation: ‘or that the coating of oil prevented the loss of bodily fluids during exercise’).

Ancient medical theory generally assumed that the body contained four humours—blood, phlegm, bile and black bile. The health of an individual, and even his or her character, was thought to be determined by the balance between these different elements, and serious imbalance could lead to health problems. Individuals with an excess of blood were described as sanguine, and thought to be ‘warm and moist’ in character, and similarly for the others (phlegm=cold and moist, phlegmatic; bile=warm and dry, choleric; black bile=cold and dry, melancholic) (for more details see here).

There were many ways in which the balance of humours could be altered—for example by particular types of diet. Most importantly for now, anointing oneself with oil was thought to have a moistening effect, and could therefore be used to bring ‘dry’ athletes back to a better balance of humours.

This extract is from a text called the Gymnasticus, by Philostratus, written in the first half of the third century AD. It’s a manual of athletic training. And this particular bit of it illustrates precisely that use of oil:

‘As far as the mixture of the humours is concerned…it has never been disputed, nor would it ever be disputed, that the best type of mixture is the warm and moist one. For it is composed, like expensive statues, from material which is unmixed and pure. For those who have a sparse supply of phlegm and bile, are consequently free of impurities and dregs and excessive humours; they also endure hard work easily when it is necessary to undergo it, and they have good digestion and are rarely ill, and recover quickly from illness, and they are submissive and easy to train in a variety of different ways thanks to their fortunate mixture of humours. Choleric athletes are on the one hand warm in temperament, but they are also dry in their mix of humours and fruitless to trainers, just as hot sand is to those who are sowing crops. Despite that they are formidable because of their mental boldness; for they have a very abundant supply of that. Phlegmatic athletes are slower in their make-up because of their coldness. These must be trained with energetic movements, whereas choleric athletes must be trained in a leisurely fashion and with breaks—in other words the former require a goad, the latter reins—and it is necessary to dry out the former [i.e. phlegmatic athletes, with a cold and moist constitution] by the application of dust, while moistening the latter [i.e. choleric athletes, with a warm and dry constitution] with oil. (Gymnasticus 42)

Summary

The jargon of ancient humoural theory looks a bit daunting and peculiar to modern eyes at first sight, but I think the basic point still comes through very clearly here: anointing with oil could moisten the body and so be particularly useful to those with an excessively dry constitution.

(Humoural theory also explains many of the other details here. For example, covering the skin with dust was thought to have a drying effect, so might be particularly appropriate for an excessively ‘moist’ athlete. The point about styles of exercise in the sentence before works in a similar way: vigorous exercise was thought to warm the body, so made sense particularly for ‘cold’ athletes in the phlegmatic category, but should be discouraged for ‘choleric’ athletes, who needed to be cooled).